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Walther's experience with the pedantry which had condemned him the day before, when he had sung as impulse, love, and youthful ardor had prompted, leads him to decline the distinction; but the old poet discourses on the respect due to the masters and their, work as the guaranty of the permanence of German art, and persuades him to enter the guild of mastersingers.
In the autumn of 1856 he began "Siegfried," the composition of which was not finished until 1869, owing to many other objects which engaged his attention during this period, one of which was the composition of "The Mastersingers," which he wrote at intervals between 1861 and 1867.
Less poetic than their predecessors, these Mastersingers, as they named themselves, often took refuge in arbitrary rules and set metrical forms that made a poor substitute for real inspiration. That there was some genuine poetic feeling and humour among them is shown by the work of Hans Sachs, the greatest of their number.
Thematically this is much richer than the spring-song in, for instance, the Valkyrie, and for the best of reasons that in the Valkyrie is incidental, part of a long duet woven from quite other material, while that in the Mastersingers is itself the material of a large portion of the opera.
He was among the earliest of the German poets who took up the miracle plays and mysteries after they had been abandoned by the church and developed them on the lines which ran out into the classic German drama. Out of these plays German comedy arose, and among those who rocked its cradle was another of the mastersingers who plays a part in Wagner's opera, Hans Folz.
By romping over Europe like any itinerant conductor of this day, he might earn an uncertain livelihood: as for any prospect of getting on with his Mastersingers, his Ring and a score of other plans bubbling in his head, that was a receding prospect indeed: every year, every month, made the prospect still more remote.
Let me repeat that the Mastersingers is notable for the endless flow of beautiful melodies, neither broken and scrappy nor, on the other hand, approaching monotony: there is infinite variety combined with magnificent breadth; for the nobility hidden under homeliness a characteristic most marked in Sachs' music; for miraculous colouring now pitched in a low and tender key, now blazing as in the last finale; for the picture of Nuremberg in the old time, and for the vigour and fun with which the old life is depicted.
He was not built to be happy in the outer world, but in his world of art he was content; in the outer world he might have an hour of felicity and months of misery, but given a chance of settling down for a while to his operas he at once became and remained cheerful. Fate did not will that in the case of the Mastersingers his contentment should endure any length of time.
But as he gets on with what he has to say Wagner warms up to his work, and we get many inspired pages, some of them showing the tendency to indulge in counterpoint of the finest sort which manifested itself more fully in the Mastersingers, though here the movement is fuller of rude impetuosity. The Wanderer music is sublime.
He had not yet mastered his new musico-dramatic art; indeed, I much doubt whether he realized its possibilities. In his Tristan days he knew how to avoid explanations on the stage; nothing in Tristan needs explanation; in the Mastersingers and the Ring his resources his inventiveness and technical mastery of music were unbounded, and an intractable incident he simply smothered in splendid music.
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